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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Delay in hearing appeals as good as justice denied

Delay in hearing appeals as good as justice denied

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published Published on Oct 15, 2015   modified Modified on Oct 15, 2015
-The Times of India

The wheels of justice, the saying goes, grind slowly but grind exceedingly fine. In the Indian context, it would be more true to say that they grind so exceedingly slowly that there can be nothing fine about the outcome. When we set out to look at instances of gross miscarriage of justice, we found several cases where people were convicted of heinous crimes and locked up for years before being found innocent on appeal.

Given the state of our high courts, this is hardly surprising. Consider the cold statistics first. As of end of June 2014, there were nearly 45 lakh cases pending in the country's 24 high courts. That's an average of nearly 2 lakh cases per high court. This is mindboggling in itself, but pales in comparison to the situation in Allahabad HC, where approximately 7 lakh cases are pending.

The extent of pending cases is only to be expected when you look a little deeper into the same official data. It also tells you that as of end of June 2014, there were 265 vacancies for judges in the HCs against a sanctioned strength of 906, a shortfall of almost 30%. In the case of Allahabad HC, 70 of 160 positions were vacant or, about 44% of the judges required for the voluminous work have not been appointed.

Of the cases pending, about 10.3 lakh in all the HCs and 3.5 lakh in Allahabad alone were criminal cases. Assume for argument's sake that just one in a hundred of these cases will end up in the acquittal of the person or persons convicted by the lower courts — the actual acquittal rate will, of course, be much higher, but even if 1% of those convicted is innocent — then over 10,000 people in the country are wrongly locked currently. They are in jail despite being innocent of the crime they are said to have committed. For a system supposedly based on the principle that it is better for ten guilty people to go scot-free than for one innocent to be wrongly convicted, that is a shocking statistic.

It isn't as if a person who has been wrongly convicted can count on a quick reprieve on appeal. In Allahabad HC, for instance, it takes, on average, 30 years for appeals against conviction in a lower court to be decided. The Rajasthan HC also has criminal cases pending since 1985. In Bombay HC, you could wait anywhere between two and 20 years, but the average time it takes for an appeal to be heard is four to seven years if a convict is in jail and the sentence is over 10 years; and 10-15 years if the convict is on bail pending the appeal hearing.

The exact period of waiting may vary from HC to HC, but in most cases it runs into several years. And if the crime involved is murder, the wrongfully convicted person will be serving time while he or she waits. And for a very long time. By the time they are acquitted, most have wasted their best years in conviction. If this isn't travesty of justice, what is?

Here are some real cases. One Ayodhya was convicted by the Gonda district judge for dacoity and murder in 1982 and appealed promptly. He was fi nally acquitted in September this year after having been in jail for two years and 30 more years under the shadow of a wrongful conviction though out on bail. Getting employment or social acceptance in this period must have been next to impossible.

Kanem Anjamma of East Godavari in Andhra was convicted in January 2010 along with her husband for murdering their neighbour G Nageswara Rao in 2007. Locked up for over five years, Anjamma finally was acquitted by HC in June this year. Kavita Sharma and her alleged paramour, Krishna Kumar Sain, were arrested in 2004 for murdering Kavita's husband and convicted by the trial court in 2006. In July this year, the Rajasthan HC acquitted them. They had spent 11 years in jail.

The loss of their freedom apart, each of these people had to carry the stigma of being criminals and murderers and in most cases by the time the grinding wheels of justice spat out their final verdict, there really wasn't much of a life to return to. That these are not isolated cases, but are illustrative of a deep malaise, is evident from the statistics on pendency of cases. The adage about justice delayed being justice denied has never been truer or more powerfully brought home.

(With bureau inputs from states)

Compensating for lost years

In most developed countries, a wrongful conviction can lead to the aggrieved person seeking huge compensations. The reason is despite their proven innocence, those convicted find the odds of relocating themselves in society diffi cult. It's for this that such countries claim an obligation to facilitate fi nancial compensation to the wrongfully convicted.

In our country, the only reward for wrongful conviction is release from prison, never mind if the life of that person has been destroyed after years and sometimes decades in prison, for no fault of theirs.

TOI looks at the state of justice — rather its miscarriage — that is unwittingly functioning towards a more criminalized society than a 'humanistic' one. The old aphorism, "Let justice be done though the heavens fall," is turned on its head in our country, where the heavens fall on countless innocents who await the assistance of a system that wrongfully convicted them.
Times View

The provision of justice is among the most basic of services the state is expected to render to its citizens. The data here makes it abundantly clear that the Indian state has failed miserably in discharging this duty. At a time when all reasoned opinion says India needs more judges at every level than it currently has, how can the state escape the responsibility for vacancies of the order of about 20% in the Supreme Court, 30% in the high courts and nearly 22% in the lower courts?

Almost every week, there's a report in this paper of someone being found innocent by the courts — but only after he/ she has spent years and years in jail. This Sunday, we carried a report of the Bombay HC declaring a person not guilty of murder — 14 years after he had been thrown behind bars, eight of them while his appeal was pending. In many such long-pending cases, the defendants are abjectly poor and cannot afford bail, forget a decent lawyer. Some of them don't even come to trial for years though theirs are relatively minor infractions of the law such as pickpocketing; it's not uncommon for undertrials to spend more time in jail than the maximum term they would have got if convicted. It's almost as if these people are forgotten once they're thrown behind bars.

Since it is the state's negligence that is largely responsible for such delays, it is only fair it compensates those found to have been wrongfully confined if their appeal has taken more than a stipulated time to decide or the appeals court holds that the earlier conviction was a case of very poor judicial judgement. It cannot undo the years of freedom they've lost, or the damage to their reputation, but it can bring some support to those who've lost years of their working lives in jail. At the very least, it should pay Rs 50 lakh for every year lost, to someone who had no income. For those with modest incomes the amount should be Rs 1 crore per year, Rs 3 crore per year for those with middling incomes and Rs 7 crore-Rs 10 crore per year for those in higher income brackets. These sums may appear high, but remember they include both compensation for irreparable harm and an element of deterrence for wrongful confinement or tardy administration of justice.

There should be fast-tracking of appeals, at least in cases like the Aarushi murder. Someone might legitimately ask why the Talwars should receive 'preferential treatment'. It is possible that in many other cases waiting to be heard, the collection of evidence and police investigation was shockingly slipshod — as in the Aarushi case — and due process of law not followed. So why should the Talwars not have to wait like everybody else? It's because they've been convicted of murdering their daughter in a case where the unanswered questions are too glaring and too many to ignore. There can be no fate worse than that of parents who may have been wrongfully convicted of their child's murder. First, the grief of losing a child in gruesome circumstances, and then being viewed as murderers by the world. An expeditious hearing is all they seek — and it should be granted.

In the end, the entire system needs to be fixed, and soon. How many years more will we let countless thousands rot in jail — away from home and family — for crimes they haven't committed? More than these people, it is the state and the criminal justice system on trial here.

The Times of India, 15 October, 2015, http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Delay-in-hearing-appeals-as-good-as-justice-denied/articleshow/49368884.cms


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